What if 2 people claim to have lost the password to the same account ? How could we ever know who's lying ?
What stops people from claiming to have lost a password to a bunch of inactive accounts they never owned hoping to get lucky with 1?
An account being inactive for x time doesn't proove anyones ownership.
I have forwarded this to the rest of the team anyway to get their thoughts on it.
Good relevant questions to which I do not have a perfect answer too (and I am not sure if they exist).
There are only a handful of accounts which received a stake through marketing etc. which makes the overview quite manageable.
When someone tries to get lucky with one of them accounts there will probably only be one if none that doe not reply to the inquiry from the developers to
prove their account to be active. The chance of a fraudster finding an account with a lost password that does not reply to the message from the developers is very, very small and should discourage any fraudster of trying to claim a stake through this method. After all, if there is one inactive account, there will only be one "fraudster" to be able to "steal" that stake.
And if no-one has lost their password, there will be no problem at all.
Once an account has been proven to be active after a claimed "locked account" then you encourage the person in question to double backup their password and make sure they can reclaim their password through the built in password recovery in this forum board.
Furthermore a testing period of this policy could be put in place to see if there are any claims coming in, in this testing period, any claimed stake can still be declined by the developers of the NEM at the launch of NEM. This way, the power of decision making lies still in the hands of the developers, again discouraging any fraudster and making it possible to stop any attempt to steal some elses stake.
When two people claim to have lost an account, and indeed the account claimed does not reply we should let both parties know there is another person claiming to be the rightful owner. From this point on the power to hand out the stake still lies in the developers team and they can decide to not give out the stake to either two. The discussion that follows or will not follow can make a difference.
An inactive period of time does not prove ownership, but the the knowledge that your account's stake will 100% never be claimed does.